And they overcame him by the Blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony, and they loved not their lives unto death. (Rev. 12:11)
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Feb 28, 2015

CERN Physicist Amit Goswami: We Have No Idea What We're Doing…

If you check physics articles on occasion you may have noticed that major names in the field of scientists have radically differing ideas about what's going on...even about what constitutes reality. Now one of the founders of CERN admits that they don't know what they are doing. Reality is rarely what we read in the news...

Now, this one was shared by a lot of you who, like me, have been following the developments at CERN's large hadron collider in Geneva with a bit of a jaundiced eye. First we had the sort-of announcement of the discovery of the so-called "god particle," the Higgs boson, allegedly the particle in the quantum pantheon for imparting mass to everything else. I say "pantheon" here because it strikes me as extremely odd and curious that physics seems somehow trapped in the old this-god-does-that-function paradigm: we have gods of "wisdom, fertility, and (pick a function)" and this particle-does-mass and that particle does that... and spin moments, and directionality, and quarks and "colors,"...

I'm reminded a bit of the old nominalist-versus-realist debates of the late Middle Ages. But anyway, back to the Higgs. Then the discovery was sort-of retracted, then sort-of confirmed.Then we even heard, briefly, of some sort of "discovery" of something with "superluminal" velocities, but no, that's impossible because Pope Einstein said so. Then we had the stories coming out of how some physicists were actually toying with the idea of recasting their equations entirely without the notion of dimensionality, allegedly, so the story would seem, because of the High Weirdness they're finding when they crank up their alchemical machine at Geneva. When I heard that one I had to do a double-take, for the idea of modern mathematical physics without dimensionality in the equations would seem to throw the whole last 200 years of physics into a cocked hat. Maxwell, of course, had his quaternions with its scalar potentials, but even he had to get around to dimensionality at some point. Einstein's general relativity is a highly dimensional theory, as are the various early 20th century stabs at unified field theories from Kaluza-Klein to Vaclav Hlavaty and on down even to modern string and m-theory. It's as if they are suggesting that the whole of mathematical physics be recast as a theory of Nothing with lots and lots of scalars and zero-sum vectors (or are those the same thing? One can imagine David Bohm asking such a question).

Then along comes Indian theoretical physicist Amit Goswami, who, fed up with the underlying Cartesian-materialist-epiphenomenalism of it all, just bluntly proposes in Leibnizian fashion that consciousness - that's right, immaterial, incorporeal, metaphysical consciousness, Mind itself, as it were - is the underlying bedrock of physics, and not a bunch of particles emerging from an endless Dirac sea of ...well... nothing once again. Needless to say, his views are controversial.
Well, now Dr. Goswami has joined Stephen Hawking in warning about CERN's Large Hadron collider, fearing that at some point, something catastrophic might happen. In fact, he goes further, in this article, by saying "We (physicists) have no ******* idea what we're doing:"

"The University of Oregon professor warned that the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, could potentially wipe out the entire planet if the project is not put to a halt.
“'Seriously, when myself, Higgs and Ben (Benjamin Lockspeiser CERN’s first president) first pitched the idea, we never thought it would get funding. It was gonna cost billions for Christs sake,' he recalled. “'**** knows what the thing does – no one does. Firing particles at each other at the speed of light can’t end well. I’m just worried now we took the joke too far'." (Emphasis added)